Passage to India Part 2

Chandigarh December 7, 2008

I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improve four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city which the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dentist graduate, to a young engineer who works with the Tata’s. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

 

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S.to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarhis considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India's bread basket. However most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S. 

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarhand I had the chance to meet with the Director of the college Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Phillips Labs from Delhi. Phillips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India, they support all of Phillips divisions including the medical division in Andover, MA. For example they recently launch a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston Universityhas a world renowned public health department that has projects in India, I need to connect them to Phillips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, who have been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cellphone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cellphone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cellphone retail distributors. They have been struggling to differentiate themselves other than price. He told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but stumbled on to a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most Indian villages and is unreliable when it is. I asked him if he considered differentiating on the cellphone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers.

Comments

[Ameesh]

Vinit,the rural market could use portable wind up chargers or solar ones.
Great blog...